[EM] Is range voting the panacea we need?

[Brian Olson]

Being able to express ratings on a ballot is more expressive than only 
being able to express rankings. I think more expressive is a good 
thing.

On the back end, we could silently collapse the ratings into rankings 
by sorting the candidates, then apply Condorcet, IRV, etc. But, those 
make assumptions about the relative strengths of preference for the 
ranked choices and we don't need to make assumptions since we actually 
have relative strength data in the ballot.

Straight rating summation is vulnerable to strategic voting. Perhaps in 
this study people voted honestly because it obviously didn't matter and 
so there was no incentive to vote strategically. In a real election the 
stakes would be higher.

My favorite solution is to run Instant Runoff style disqualification 
cycles over Normalized Ratings (IRNR). I believe this method is 
strategy proof and passes a handful of other desirable election method 
criterion.


In general, the more (good,accurate,honest) information we get out of 
the voters, the better we should be able to maximize social utility. 
Conceivably, we could create a ballot that records a whole probability 
distribution from each voter about each choice expressing how much they 
like each choice and how sure they are and how they believe they might 
be wrong about a choice. Summing all such ballots up we ought to arrive 
at a choice that most likely makes the most people the happiest. I 
believe this level of detail is excessive for all but a telepathically 
linked cyborg society.

On Dec 15, 2004, at 6:42 PM, RLSuter at aol.com wrote:

> Will someone on the list who has studied range voting and compared it 
> to
> Condorcet, approval, and other methods please comment on Doug Greene's 
> paper? He
> appears to be saying that range voting is superior to all other single 
> winner
> methods. Are there good arguments against this conclusion? Does range 
> voting
> have serious flaws? If so, could someone briefly summarize them?
>
> Thanks,
> Ralph Suter
>
> In a message dated 12/15/04 3:08:26 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> election-methods-electorama.com-request at electorama.com writes:
>
>> The long-awaited results of the Nov. 2004 range-voting presidential
>>  pseudo-election are now available.   Paper also includes an
>>  approval-voting pseudo-election and some other things!  Packed with 
>> data
>>  from the real world!
>>
>>     http://math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html    go to #82.
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Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/